When Abhay Deol decided to produce his own movie, he must surely have known the pitfalls. As an actor, you are unencumbered of any responsibility towards the film except to play your part.
If you are a big star, everything on the sets is designed to keep you happy. A producer on the other hand bears the burden of all the stresses that come in the movie’s making —from starry tantrums to raising finance to finding distributors.
Despite all the expected travails, Abhay went ahead with it and the movie, One By Two, is expected to hit the screens shortly. The heroine is his girlfriend Preeti Desai, which takes the label home production a notch further.
Everything seemed to be going fine until Abhay recently experienced the tensions associated with being a producer. The movie’s music was composed by Shankar-Ehsan-Loy and the rights had been bought by T-Series. The two parties were having a dispute over royalties and Abhay decided to take the side of the composers.  This is a stand supported by all the musicians in the industry given that Bollywood has a record of not recognising creative rights.
T-Series however, retaliated by not marketing the music of the movie since they saw it as a reneging of a contract. Abhay then turned the fight up another notch with a Facebook post in which he said that he has just done the “unthinkable” by taking on a “giant record label”.
As a result, there were no albums available in the market. He hoped for support from the fraternity and prayed that the film’s fortunes would not be affected. And then Abhay followed this up by going to an Awards function with makeup which looked like he had a black eye.
It was splashed all over the newspapers. And the gimmick seems to have worked because you next heard that the issue had been resolved and the music would be released.



Kalki denies Huma behind Anurag split

It’s been sometime since Anurag Kashyap and Kalki Koechlin decided to separate. Curiously, however, rumours are now floating on the reason why it happened.
It is said that the actress Huma Qureshi might have something to do with it.  Her debut film had been Anurag’s Gangs of Wasseypur and the rumour went that they started an affair during the time which ultimately led to Kalki walking out of the marriage.
Huma has since then gone places, being cast in good roles by directors like Vishal Bharadwaj. In the recently released Dedh Ishqiya, too, she had a meaty part. The movie didn’t do too well commercially but was raved about by critics. This will do plenty of good to Huma’s career and she is, all said and done, a good actress.
Ironically, she had done a horror film along with Kalki recently. Anurag countered the rumours by saying that he was not upset at a personal level at these baseless reports but only to the extent that they would harm Huma’s image and career.
He asked for the media to leave her alone. Recently, they were also snapped together at an event after a request by photographers and he said that he knew even then that they were doing it only to fuel the gossip.
But the surprising twist in the tale came when Kalki, too, echoed Anurag and said Huma had nothing to do with their marital issues.

Fading into oblivion


It is hard being a former star and it is all the more so if you are a woman in Bollywood. Some like Jaya Prada, Jaya Bachchan and Hema Malini find meaning in politics or marriage.
But for many others, it is just a lonely descent if they don’t want to end up being typecast in mother roles. Rekha, for example, saw movie offers trickling down to nothing over the decades.
Zeenat Aman’s case is also similar. She kept making appearances in movies but there was nothing in the sense of being a permanent mainstay in Bollywood.
One of her movies in which she has a small part is now about to release but even that has landed in a little issue. The director of the movie went public stating that when the time came to publicise it, Zeenat went missing. She was not answering the phone and her secretary was insisting that Zeenat would only participate if she got paid an extra US$ 9,000 in advance.
That is a really small number by Bollywood standards but then the movie is also a really low budget one. The movie, incidentally, was shot a few years ago and Zeenat’s secretary says that it is unreasonable for the filmmaker to now suddenly make this demand. But, on a side note, it is always a good practice in Bollywood to take the money in advance because it is a momentous task to get the money owed to you.


Full HD and for free  — to beat piracy!

Piracy is the biggest drainer of revenues for the movie industry across the world. Bollywood has been running a relentless war to stop the proliferation of torrents and websites from which illegal downloads of movies are done.
Sometimes, it has led to unseemly controversy when the government, unable to specifically target websites, blacked out entire networks based on such complaints.
The makers of the critically acclaimed 2012 movie Ship Of Theseus have come up with a radical solution to this issue. They are going to put up the full HD version of the movie online and anyone can download it for free. Those who are interested can make a donation in support of the initiative. This, of course, means that there cannot technically be any piracy possible.
On the other hand, there would be a loss of earnings. But the philosophy behind it is to make everything open source and believe in the goodness of viewers to pay for what they get.
It is not something that you will ever see big production houses doing because there is far too much money involved. But for small Indi filmmakers who rely on film festivals for exposure this might be a good way to go.

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